Jean-Claude Van Damme and Roger Moore are a Terrific Twosome in Van Damme's 1996 Directorial Debut The Quest
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I’ve always been a Jean-Claude Van Damme fan. I find him charismatic and engaging as well as really, really ridiculously good-looking. If nothing else, Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles afford viewers the not insubstantial pleasure of spending 90 minutes ogling that beautiful man, his perfect face and ripped body.
But I’ve only begun to appreciate him recently. I’ve always thought of him as a true movie star who only made a couple of good movies but a patron-funded side-quest on his radiant prime has revealed that Van Damme made a couple of genuinely good movies in the mid 1990s alone.
There’s 1993’s Hard Target, of course, a stone-cold masterpiece that marked the triumphant English language debut of John Woo, followed by 1994’s Timecop, 1995’s Maximum Risk, 1997’s Double Team and 1998’s Knock Off.
I know 1998 is late nineties rather than mid 1990s but it happened around this time period.
Of course the prolific, cocaine-fueled Van Damme made some stinkers during this stint as well, like Street Fighter, but the vast majority of his films were super entertaining. I can now add the martial artist’s 1996 directorial debut The Quest to this list of Van Damme winners from his Clinton-era golden age.
The movie under-performed at the box-office domestically but did better internationally and was eviscerated by critics for shamelessly recycling Van Damme’s breakthrough film Bloodsport, as if that’s somehow a bad thing.
The story for The Quest is credited to Jean-Claude Van Damme and Frank Dux, the world class fantasist the action superstar ostensibly played in his 1988 breakout movie Bloodsport. Dux told so many whoppers, fibs and straight-up lies that he’s practically a fictional character as well as a real person.
That makes sense, since the film’s simple but effective premise is essentially, “Bloodsport/Kickboxer but in the 1920s.” “Martial artist enters competition against fighters from other countries with different fighting styles” has long been one of the most popular plots for action movies.
It certainly worked for Enter the Dragon! The Quest opens unnecessarily in the present, with hero Christopher Dubois (Jean-Claude Van Damme) buried under so many layers of terrible old man make-up that it makes one of the most beautiful men ever to grace the silver screen look like Biff Tannen in the future sequences in Back to the Future II.
Some hoodlums try to rob a bar and are quickly and efficiently defeated by what appears to be the oldest man in the world. The bartender asks how he learned to fight so well.
The rest of the movie then unfolds in flashback to answer the barkeep’s question. When we reconnect with Christopher in his virile youth he is wearing clown make-up as part of his role as the king of the New York street rats.
Van Damme made up as a street clown is a striking image I can’t help but imagine is an homage to the single silliest moments in the history of the James Bond franchise, when the coolest stud in the history of western pop culture literally dressed up like a clown for a mission.
It was Moore’s underrated, deliriously fun stint as 007 in microcosm. If you’re willing to put on clown make-up to gallivant about the big top playing an iconic badass, then you’re up for anything.
That was Moore as James Bond: a twinkle in his eyes, a cheeky grin, a blessedly light comic tough and an utter unwillingness to take himself remotely seriously. That’s also Moore in The Quest in the scene-stealing role of Lord Edgar Dobbs, a globe-trotting con artist and former military man who alternately hinders and assists our high-flying hero in his misadventures.
Moore understood more than most movie stars that wearing make-up and pretending to be other people is a ridiculous way to make a living so you might as well have fun with it.
That’s Van Damme’s philosophy here. The movie introduces his character as essentially a good, heroic version of Fagin in Oliver Twist. True, he’s a grown-ass man in charge of a bunch of scruffy child criminals, but he apparently rules his boy gang benevolently.
The idea of Fagin, but good amuses me greatly. It makes me think of other variations like Affable Hitler and Mussolini, But Quirky Rather than Evil.
Van Damme’s Heroic Fagin and his backstreet boys succeed in stealing a lot of money from gangsters, who are very eager to get it back.
Christopher escapes death by stowing away on a ship and eventually ends up being sold into slavery by Moore’s opportunistic scoundrel. The angry young man makes the most of his time as a slave and becomes a fierce Muay Thai fighter.
When Lord Dobbs and Christopher meet up again at a match it is, as you might imagine, a little awkward but they’re pragmatists so they enter into a partnership of convenience that involves the older man buying the younger man’s freedom so that he can enter him into a mysterious international martial arts competition where the main prize is a valuable gold dragon.
In The Ghang-gheng, the competition that takes up the film’s first act, fighters from different countries square off against each other with the exception of Africa, which is represented by a single fighter who gets defeated in the first role.
I know it is silly to get mad at the racial politics of action movies considering they almost invariably involve attractive white people beating the holy living shit out of people of color, but the movie’s casual racism is so brazen that it becomes comic.
The United States is supposed to be represented by heavyweight champion Maxie Devine, an old time boxer, complete with manly mustache, played by a perfectly typecast James Remar as a man of honor who prioritizes the needs of his country over his own needs.
Not me! It has its admirable qualities (the musician Prince was pretty great and I’m quite enamored of the actor Nicolas Cage) but The United States mostly sucks these days.
Maxie feels otherwise. When Christopher defeats him in a fight and, in one of the many things that amused me about The Quest, the most European man in the history of the continent then represents The United States.
Lord Dobbs and his sidekick, meanwhile, try to steal the Golden Dragon and must be bailed out by their hero.
The Quest is never better than when it’s asking the eternal question, “Why can’t Newsies also be Mortal Kombat?” but it’s simple and satisfying throughout and Van Damme and Moore have terrific chemistry.
As with Hard Target, Timecop and Sudden Death, Van Damme is upstaged by a more charismatic older character actor, but this time it’s his buddy instead of the bad guy.
The Quest might be better with an experienced Hong Kong master in the director’s chair but Van Damme does a fine if not terribly distinguished job his first time around.
Next up is JCVD, which would be perfect for The Fractured Mirror except that it’s Belgian, and consequently not appropriate for a book exclusively about American movies.
Oh well. I’m in a major Jean-Claude Van Damme and movies about movies groove right now so I’m more excited about revisiting JCVD, a movie I very much remember enjoying, than ever.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!
PLUS, for a limited time only, get a FREE copy of The Weird A-Coloring to Al when you buy any other book in the Happy Place store!
Buy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop
Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace We just added a bunch of new tiers and merchandise AND a second daily blog just for patrons!
Alternately you can buy The Weird Accordion to Al, signed, for just 19.50, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here.
I make my living exclusively through book sales and Patreon so please support independent media and one man’s dream and kick in a shekel or two!